Disclaimer: I don't own Divergent.
Mia's funeral was today.
I didn't bother staying for it. I liked Mia, and she deserved better in this life, but the Abnegation in me couldn't stomach the Dauntless method of mourning. Who the hell goes to a funeral to get blackout drunk, or tell casual jokes about the deceased? Crazy that they even allow loud music to be played, or fireworks to be ignited in the Pit. Well, each faction has a unique way of saying goodbye to its members. It makes perfect sense that Abnegation and Dauntless would go about it in opposite ways.
Back where I grew up, the dead are cremated without a ceremony, and not before donating all usable organs. The only event resembling a funeral is the mass gathering of the neighbors at the home of the deceased, to provide food and prayers for the family. I don't think that often about the one that took place at my house, shortly after Mom's death. Too painful for me, even now that I'm grown.
When I heard Tori start to give the speech on Mia's behalf, to honor her short life and her few acts of bravery, I snuck away from the crowd and hunkered down near the chasm for nearly an hour. Weird, I know, since it's where Mia died. Yet I felt a lot safer there than among the other Dauntless.
Still, I heard it clearly when they all began to chant Mia's name. It's a ritual here, and it's done at every memorial service, whether it's for an initiate or a member. Luckily, Mia's didn't last too long. The chants faded, then I assume her body was taken to be disposed of within the twenty-four-hour window, as Dauntless custom requires.
Only after that did I feel safe enough to sneak back to the Pit.
As I'd guessed, Mia's casket was gone. So were all the mourners, even the ones who just came to have a drink. I was going to leave for good, when I saw Eric. He was standing close to where I'd been before I fled to the chasm, and he looked lost. Sad, too.
I could've greeted him, could've allowed him to explain why he did what he did to Mia. But all I chose to do that time was turn and depart the Pit, not giving my former friend a second look, and in my heart of hearts, I know I did right.
"Initiates, get ready." Amar finishes ascending the stairs and stops in front of a vast prism of a room. Two of its walls are made of stone the color of graphite, the other two are made of glass. Amar points to the by-now-familiar machine sitting next to the entrance. "This time, you'll be aware that it's simulated. But it won't be any less scary. You'll have to face down all of your fears, one after the other."
I swallow and feel my nerves rattle inside of me. So that's where the instructors got the name "fear landscape". I look at the Dauntless-born initiates with us to see what they think. Of course, Zeke's one of those who're already getting anxious, just like I am.
"Crap," I hear him mumble softly. "I don't wanna know myself anymore."
To everyone's surprise, Amar offers some reassurance instead of upping the ante. "Oh, you won't be seeing your own landscape today. You'll get to experience my friend Lora's biggest fears." Smoothly gesturing with his hand, he indicates who Lora is. Eric, Shauna, and I already know, though. She's the orange-haired control room employee who helped us sneak out of the compound unnoticed.
On her face is a grin of anticipation. She's rubbing her hands together as she talks. "Alright," she says. "So today, we'll be starting off slow. Each of you will only have one fear to face." While I struggle to keep my terror beneath the surface, she starts listing all the fears that used to keep her up at night. I'm thinking, damn, that's one long list. Spiders, snakes, rats, deep water, death by suffocation, death by crushing, disembowelment, public speaking, rejection by potential mates, getting ghosted, getting cheated on, forced nakedness, forced pregnancy, giving birth without an anesthetic, and violence by a romantic partner.
It gives me chills, realizing that most people have this many fears. I'm not really ready to stare down ten or fifteen of my phobias at once. Well, I can rest easier knowing the fear landscape differs from the standard Dauntless fear simulation. Now every initiate's gonna have that special awareness that only I had. No more cheating accusations, no more little pinches of guilt.
It's at once a curse and something to be grateful for. When Lora's done listing off all her fears, she motions to the closest initiate. "Eric, you'll go first," she tells him. "The fear you'll be facing is…"
The pause lengthens. Eric and I, and the other initiates, take in a collective breath.
It's let out with Lora's final decision. "Intimate partner violence," she pronounces. She beckons and Eric submits, stepping forward. He slowly walks over to Lora, no agitation or reluctance on his face.
He's a pretty good actor, I think to myself. But playing pretend won't save him. I know him too well, and I know this has him scared stiff. And honestly? It's only half of what he deserves for the things he's done.
Eric's screaming. He hasn't screamed so loud in such a long time.
Who knows, this could be the first time in his lifetime that he's done this. And it's a greater embarrassment to his Dauntless record than even his sixth-place rank. In the latter case, those without access to the recordings of the simulation might disagree on what made him screw up. They could say it was a fear so extreme, not even Max would make it out alive. But in the former case, every living soul standing outside of the fear landscape room saw everything that went down in the sim.
What's more, Eric can't give the excuse that he believed he would really die. He didn't, and Amar knows that. Lora knows, too, and so do all of his competitors. They probably think Lora's fear bled into him, became one of his own, the ultimate insult to his Dauntless manhood. Imagine being this scared of your own dead girlfriend! Well, it's a good thing none of them know the truth, that Eric fears being haunted by Mia specifically because he killed her. Better public humiliation than a trial, conviction, and execution for murder.
Not that this lowers the severity of Eric's traumatic experience. If the other initiates had to go through the same, he speculates, none of them would be smirking, as they're doing now, or giving him those eye-rolls. They'd be even more disabled than he is now. They wouldn't last even a tenth of the amount of time that he did. Being a transfer who's had to prove over and over that he does belong, he just knows that they all have less nerve and less mettle than he does.
He did go about it coolly at first, even when he found himself in total darkness, even when he heard these sounds that resembled bare feet sliding over wet tiles. Then he realized he was being followed, and that the thing coming to get him was a live version of Mia's sickening corpse, complete with the neck bent perpendicular to the spine, the head basted from top to bottom with blood, and the staring eyes devoid of a life essence.
All it took was a single sighting of the creature. After that, Eric couldn't fight, strategize, reason, or plan ahead. He could only run.
The Mia-creature moved faster, though.
Its stinky, necrosing body rammed into his from behind, and before he knew it, he'd somersaulted right over the metal railing and onto the curved surface above the chasm. When he looked down, he saw not the waters of the underground river, but a black void that he somehow knew would stretch on forever.
He was looking at oblivion. Where, deep down inside, he fears going after he dies.
That was not the end of it. As his body began its slide toward doom, he heard something from the abyss that had replaced the chasm. It sounded a bit like an active beehive. But on a second listen, he realized it was Mia's death wail. The same cry multiplied to infinity, the volume amplified a thousandfold.
Eric knew it was all simulated, yes. But that made literally no difference.
He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed, until his throat tore itself apart and his ears were blasted to complete deafness. He screamed until nothing in the universe existed except for him, the Mia-creature, and his powerful fear of her. Nonetheless, he kept right on screaming. And he's still making a big racket right now.
Finally, finally, he's starting to exhaust himself, and Lora must've gotten the hint, because she's getting on one knee next to him and wrapping her arms around his shoulders. "Oh, Lord. Was it too much for you?" she inquires, and Eric would swear he heard a note of ridicule in her voice.
But he gladly takes the hugs and shoulder-rubs from Lora. Well, till he hears one other person in the room say, disdainfully, "Wow. Didn't expect you to be so sensitive."
Paranoia may have addled Eric's mind, but he's still positive Tobias made the comment.
"Oh, sweetie." Lora gazes sympathetically at Eric, unaware of what he's thinking. "I'm sorry." She reaches down with a hand to help clear the tears from Eric's face.
Eric shoves at her, and her glasses fall down the bridge of her nose. "Get away from me," he warns. He gets to his feet till he stands as tall as Lora, then he starts to walk away in a hurry.
Foolishly perhaps, Lora makes like she'll go after him. But then Amar's holding her by the wrist, so she can't walk any further. "You're only making it worse," he tells her.
She ends up letting Eric go. Amar leaves for a time, to make a call to Max, and when he reappears, he says the security team's been updated on a possible runaway. The fear landscape stage will go on like it was meant to, and the initiates will speak no more of what they saw from the Erudite transfer. After all, he tells them, even if worse comes to worst, and they hear about a murder spree, or a suicide in the chasm, it'll just be yet another day in the life of a member of the cruelest faction.
"And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I stress the importance of collaboration." Jeanine Matthews holds down one of the buttons on the clicker, and the screen transitions to the next image making up her presentation. "Dauntless and Erudite are stronger when we work together. As you can see here, this experiment was highly successful due to Dauntless participation." She gives a warm look to all the Dauntless gathered in the auditorium. "Your soldiers were instrumental in keeping these factionless patients subdued."
The clapping that follows is like a roll of thunder. Meanwhile, I'm just sitting, watching, and listening. Unlike all the middle-aged Dauntless here, I don't have much investment in what the Erudite leader's got to say, just the fact that she showed up to talk to people not in her faction.
It was Bernard who delivered the news to me, that Jeanine would arrive sometime in the early afternoon. I was splitting part of my lunch from the cafeteria with him, when he told me. Now I'm here listening along with a group of older Dauntless men, and some of the gruffer-looking Dauntless women.
Jeanine's one of the most hypocritical people I ever gave an audience to, I realize. Condemns the Divergent, yet pushes for ongoing relations between two factions. How stupid are the Dauntless leaders, who supposedly hate the Divergent just as much, to clap her along as she talks?
I think about walking out, then I see something on the screen that makes me pause.
It's the picture showing all the factionless "mental patients" that were a part of the clinical trial for Jeanine's new serum. They've all been starved, are missing teeth, and bleeding from parts of their bodies I don't want to name. That by itself is already disturbing, but there's something else, something about one of the "patients" in the front row.
The medium-brown hair, the white skin, and the tennis-ball-sized knees and elbows I recognize. The person in the picture is Ysabelle. The factionless woman who'd had her clothes, her good health, everything in her life removed from her.
Jeanine and her Erudite friends tortured Ysabelle, along with all the others. They aren't only critical of people like the Divergent and the factionless, they'll mangle, scar, disable, and kill them.
As my heartbeat fills my ears, I think about what my next move will be. Going to the Dauntless leaders won't help anything, they're not gonna believe one transfer from Abnegation. And as most people here know, the Dauntless dislike Abnegation more than Erudite. Then what do I do?
I know how close Eric and Jeanine still are. I remember his story about how he and Jeanine went to the zoo, just the two of them, because Jeanine told a blatant lie to Maggie. I remember how suspicious I already was of Eric's favorite teacher, I just didn't think she'd continue telling these lies over a decade into her and Eric's relationship. Is she grooming him into becoming part of some ideology she's formed?
I have to tell Eric what I saw during Jeanine's presentation. I have to force him to see who she actually is. No, we aren't friends anymore, but I'm not gonna be doing it for him. Or even for me. I'll do it for Ysabelle and the other factionless, and all the other innocents who were rounded up, subject to experimentation, and tortured. If they aren't vindicated, none of the rest of us will be.
Well, I went to Eric with the truth about Jeanine, and he didn't believe me.
He played the victim card instead, pulled it out on her behalf. Alleged that I had a bias against her. Said that I'm biased because of "Abnegation indoctrination". At this, I felt another, familiar shiver of fear that he knows about my Divergence, similar to when he said I cheated in my last simulation.
I'd put my life at risk. I walked away from Eric, and I didn't go back.
More on that, though, when Eric was talking to me, no, when he was talking at me, it felt like he'd jabbed my eye with an ice pick and begun chipping away. It hurt me that much, though I'll never let him know. He denigrated me, beat me verbally, but what pained me wasn't actually that. It was the knowledge that I should've answered with my own barrage of shots. Should've shown Eric that his dark energy could be matched. Instead I did what I most often do, and just kept quiet.
How I'd describe myself? Coward. I'm being rough on myself, but I need to be.
I remember Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking against the use of the slogan "Black Power". He didn't want to foster feelings of hatred among white people in America. I totally got where he was coming from, yeah, but now I have firsthand experience of what happens when your main priority is those who're already favored over you.
My ancestor, who lived in the early twenty-first century, would be shaking his head at me.
I got to look upon his face for the first time, in one of the color photos from the collection the factionless leader mailed me. I saw the self-possessed look in his deep-set brown eyes, eyes that looked quite like mine. I saw his strength and his masculinity in the way he'd posed, arms slung over the shoulders of two of his friends. I saw how much pride he must've had, simply being who he was and not compromising. And I know he had that sort of pride because of what he had on in the photo.
Secured over his nose and mouth was a cloth mask, the words Black Lives Matter standing out on the fabric. And on the front of his T-shirt was a really familiar image of a raised black fist.
The members of my family stood proud in their power. They had a self-esteem that I don't have. They all made it through the era of white-supremacist hate, the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, and environmental racism, because they realized that taking the high road wouldn't work for them anymore.
They weren't going to try to appease the mostly white, wealthy men who ran their country, because they didn't want fifty more years of racism, fifty years after the publication of King's book. I need to pick up some new habits from them. I shouldn't try to appease the same people who never stopped seeing me as inferior.
While Eric was still sounding off, I heard him almost say the S-word. His tongue and teeth formed the first half of that derogatory syllable, then they almost formed the second half. Lucky for him, he stopped just in time.
But not soon enough. Eric just told me indirectly what he always thought about me. Is taking the high road again gonna work for me?
No. I'm my forefather's son. Someday I'll take back my power, and today, I'll tell Eric to get lost.
AN: Things are gonna get even darker from here on out. In the next chapter, Eric's gonna be forced to make a decision that'll impact the rest of his life. Stay tuned, and buckle up!